Schism

Can love:
Human Tetris.


Can't love:
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.
Having been bombarded with recommendations to *really listen* to this feller, I can honestly say I've tried. Furthermore, I intend to try no more. I'm not fundamentally opposed to moany acoustic types. There's room in my iPod for Emmy Lou Harris and Devendra and Gillian Welsh and Edith Frost and Elliot Smith and M.Ward and, to be frank, all manner of random wailing country, moany folk, weird folk, crusty blues, ambient shit and other tenuous generic relations - but but but - there's no longer any room for Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. Just as Lorena McKenna got scrunched before him, B 'P' B is headed for the trash. Fortunately, I've long been comfortable with the idea that I have no soul.

Caught in corporate crossfire

WTF. I thought my own private tech-curse, the touch that turns efficient technology into unwieldy lumps of plastic and metal, had struck once more. I must have caused the sudden bounceback of all the correspondence from my gmail account to any hotmail accounts. I surfed the help pages, I visited tech advice sites, I updated my browser, I cursed my curseworthy ISP, for crying out loud. And now I discover that I'm not so special, that hotmail is blocking gmail across the planet. Bothersome corporate games, bothersome implication in (read: reliance on) what I'd like to think are Other Worlds.

This is not a blog post

What this is is a mid-evening apology for a failure to post anything of note. If I had world enough and time – or rather, a smaller pile of essays to mark, fewer writing tasks, and no sleep deficit – I’d pen a series of wonderful texts as per the below. Who knows, some of these might even find their way back onto the wires, once this next week’s looming deadlines have fallen.

An imaginary letter to all the students who used the word 'nigger' - apparently without hesitation - in their discussion of racist language in Huck Finn.
A speculation on the relationship of my research interest in typographical error to the proliferation of typos undergraduate essays.
A surly and indignant consideration of why it is that my gmail account all of a sudden refuses to talk to any hotmail addresses.
A love letter to miso.
An impassioned defence of Bill Henson, with qualifications.
A laboured effort to personalise the Bill Henson debacle through reference to the removal of paintings from the Albury Regional Art Gallery, seven minutes walk from the house which sheltered me in my adolescence.
A shocked response to my alarming (Facebook enabled) discovery that one of my colleagues is a Liberal voter.
A wry piece on my return to Bob Dylan and Allan Ginsberg with an elegy to a dear friend hovering under the surface.
A suite of true stories from a dodgy steroid pumped gym in Kings Cross.
A sketch or two in preparation for a review of The Necks.
A candid account of a croissant-making masterclass, with reference and due deference to Hugo.
A fantasy on the theme of Tom Waits and Gary Snyder.

No, these must all remain unwritten. I'll nod to George Steiner as the eminence grise enabling this flagrant display of opportunities lost. With due apologies.

Instead? Instead, I'm happily sinking back into three hours of Dylan via Scorsese.

Rocket science

Martinis being lamentably distant from my life at the moment, I was heartened to discover that Science, unlike me, is not neglecting this important topic. Shaken martinis, according to research discussed here, have remarkable chemical properties. What they don't mention is that unless the gin is poured straight from the freezer, the shaking agitates and melts the ice, thus diluting the booze.

The real gem in the piece, however, has nothing to do with martinis:

Studies at Oxford University suggest that words can influence the perception of smells: as you might expect, a brie-like smell is more popular when labelled "cheese" rather than "body odour".

I wonder if the reverse is true.

Cultural relativism

For all that I enjoy slagging Dickens, I'll say this for him: he holds up under a late night skim read. The same cannot be said for Faulkner, alas. I read Absalom, Absalom years ago, just the once. This is not helping me re-read it any faster right now. If I had time, of course I'd wittily reflect on how the idiosyncrasies of my own processes of recollection and recognition mirror the interests and progress of the narrative. What did my memory select and repress? Why is this so? What is unavoidably exhumed on re-encounter? These are just the first questions I'd pose my meditative self, reaching for a bottle of scotch to stabilise the universe shattered and strewn by Faulkner's catastrophic prose. As it happens, I've got millions of essays to mark, a large handful of tedious plagiarism cases to sort out, some sort of pile of other things to mark, three reviews to write and the requisite amount of sleeping to do. Say what you like about the realist novel, it does respond well to pressure. And so it is that I find myself entertained this Saturday night grappling with pointed shards of reality. Bloomsday is approaching and thus the ritual celebration of modernist prose. Daaahlinks, I can hardly wait.

I barely had time to glance at Portugal's Eurovision offering tonight, all billowing black silk and a fellated microphone. Honestly. The closest I've been to pop-culture is thanks to my all-star Generation Y flatmate and sister: America's Hardest Prisons. 'Why do we make them wear pink underwear? Because they hate pink.' Quality voyeuristic trash. Faulkner would totally get it.

There's much to be said about the idiotic suppression of Bill Henson's exhibition up the road. I'm not going to say it as I'm hoarding my pithy comments. I'll just register my agreement with this. Funny, reading a novel about the moral and figurative leakages of a repressive, aspirational society built on violence and seeing this whole debacle play out nearby.

And then it finally ended

There was an alarm.
There was a hangover.
There was a pair of red suede boots.
There was a family shivoo at an uncivilised hour on the wrong side of the bridge.
There was a navigational crisis.
There was a bumper-meets-bumper-on-a-Mosman-morning incident.
There was sun and water.
There was salt-cod for breakfast.
There was a wholesome stroll up a hill narrowly evaded by virtue of inappropriate footwear.
There was a beagle pup and a groodle and an Irish setter and an afghan.
There was an insufficient supply of Bäsler Leckerli.
There was a too brief nap in the sun.
There was the fish-markets and pickled octopus to taste.
There was another family do.
There was more sun and water.
There was fruity wine.
There was talk of catching sharks with utes.
There was a solution to it all. (Pictured.)

Caw caw

All my anecdotage is coming from Bob Dylan these days. I learnt this from the 'Birds' episode of Theme Time Radio Hour (ep. 21 of series 2).

If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

William Faulkner

Incidentally, the buzzard is la buse (pr. la booze) en français.

Eros has landed

Location: A class on Nietzsche.

Me: Oooh kaaeeeey. The aphorism. Why is the form of the aphorism so important to Nietzsche? What does it suggest about his attitude to knowledge?

Class: ....uuuuum.

Me: Anyone?

Class: (Perfect silence. Divine awe-inspiring silence.)

Me: The aphorism. Right then. Let's have a look at an example so we have something substantial to work with. Can someone read number 69 on page 83 aloud?

Random Student: Did you say number 69, miss?

Me: Yaaairs. 69. That's right. Can you read it aloud?

Class: (All at once.) Sixty nine! Yaaargh! Sixty nine! Haaaa. Sixty nine. Yeeeeehah!

Me: Right then.


For the record, this is how the aphorism in question reads:

One has been a bad spectator of life if one has not also seen the hand that in a considerate fashion - kills.

I parry on.

Imperfections

Apart from the predictable irks - not enough money to address climate change in anyone's budget, my current assymetrical work-life balance, the very phenomenon of frozen meals, most of the bestseller lists - I compile a non-exhaustive list of irritates which my life would be better without.

• Couples who work out together at the gym.
• People who send innumerable emails to a list complaining about the volume of mail they receive and their difficulties leaving the list.
• The kids who take their speakers on the train and play shithouse RnB at mid-volume between Auburn and Mt Druitt on the Northern Line. Double irritation if they sing along.
• The higher odds of buying stale tofu in the inner east as opposed to the inner west.
• Men, particularly butchers and waiters, who get turned on by the idea of a woman eating rare steak and feel compelled to comment.
• Ug(ly) boots.

Running the gauntlet of self-improvement options in view of my recent aging and imminent decrepitude, I have also come to the conclusion that my life would be better without the internet. And yet, je demeure.

Easily pardoned, surely

OK, I'm a total dorkus. I responded to this meme which I found here. But hey, I recently got a little older and hence a little more impervious to the judgments of others about internet quizzes. What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Most of my books are in storage so little of this applies to me. All I've got to make me look well rounded is some 70s Ballard and the new Iain M. Banks novel - the rest is the syllabus + Modernism + predictables. The idea is to bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Because I don't think I know the difference between reading for school and not anymore, I'm emboldening books that I've read and italicising those that I've read and haven't finished. So now you know. Did I mention the aging process?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - highly recommended. And yet? Not yet.
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel - I HATED the little I read of this book. Finishing it would have caused me physical pain.
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote - the first (important) half is read
Moby Dick - double bold
Ulysses - quadruple bold
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - how many copies of this book have been given to me?? Maudlin autobiographical disclosures evaded.
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran. I wanted to model the title of every blog post I wrote last year on this book.
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver - que?
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - y que?
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons - I have chortled my way through the DVC though...
Inferno - ie Dante?
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon - I have, however, read Neal Stephenson's justly overlooked early eco-terror novel Zodiac from cover to craparse cover.
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - I should get extra points for having forced other people to read some of these.
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

What's with the not finishing Joyce, Library thingers? And what sane person has not started Moby Dick and finished it all the better? Perhaps I'm the wrong person to complete this survey - I finish books and, moreover, the waiter who forgot our desserts provided Sauternes in recompense. I protest. Generally, and in the direction of the universe, I protest. One day, I will fabricate my own memes - books that everyone should have read, books that I have not yet read, books that I am yet considering for whatever reading lists may present themselves in the future.

Prowling, not procrastinating

Diddling–or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle–is sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing, diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, as a tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining–not the thing, diddling, in itself, but man, as an animal that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.
...
What constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. "Man was made to mourn," says the poet. But not so:–he was made to diddle. This is his aim–his object–his end. And for this reason when a man's diddled we say he's "done."

Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.

Edgar Allan Poe, 'Diddling considered as one of the exact sciences.'

If the verb to diddle appears in any one of the Poe papers before me, I will add five to the raw mark awarded.

Words sort of similar to diddle which I also like include: fiddle, doddle, riddle, noodle, skedaddle, niggle, beadle, fuddle, dandle 'and grin.'

Funghissimo

mushrooms mushrooms mushrooms singing garlic mushrooms mushrooms pepper mushrooms salt mushrooms and mushrooms rye rye rye wry mushrooms pepper and mushrooms mushrooms garlic garlic mushrooms looming blushmoons mushrooms garlic beckoning mushrooms mushrooms rosemary rye rosemary with mushrooms mushrooms to mushrooms wallowing garlic mushrooms hushrooms and salt salt slatternly salt

I'm tired. Faulkner beckons. And the Gertrude Stein list is back in action. A flurry of action, a blizzard of email. There is little I have encountered in my prolonged professional torpor quite so dire as scholarly societies devoted to the study of a single author.

Prolonged torpor can take several forms, I've discovered. It can be semesterised and involve marking spreadsheets, stagnant discussion, too much coffee and sentimental thoughts about smoking. It can also take place in a humid military dictatorship, build on extreme culture-shock, and involve starvation rations, the risk of scorpion bite and borderline delirium. This time last year I was finishing up a most challenging (euphemism) meditation retreat in Burma. The sparse clouds of inner peace I attained there seem to have wafted away; the hip injury incurred sitting cross-legged on a wooden floor has stayed. Ach, the old meditation hip. That's one to browbeat younger relatives with in the future. More garlic mushrooms will probably help.

Mushrooms speak to memory. The above were Swiss and Brown and Yes. The below were picked by mine own hands over Easter in a pine forest outside Oberon. Tatiana? Not I. Saffron milk-caps du forêt, pictured with authentic debris du forêt. Come food shortages, I will be protein-sufficient.

Q. People Who Died While Playing Cards?

A. Wild Bill Hickok, Al Jolson, Buster Keaton, the gangster Arnold Rothstein

These are the things you learn from Theme Time Radio Hour.

This article crunches the numbers and exposes the contents of Dylan's brain. Not many ladies, lots of Tom Waits. Oh Bob. Much more appealing than a sheaf of presentations on Huck Finn. I've just downloaded the two Round the World episodes to fuel my escapist fantasies. Here's the view. Lots of blue.

Ballad of a Thin Man

The last photo posted on this blog is a picture of Amy Sedaris sucking on a can of whipped cream. This strikes me as Bad. Here's something better.
It's a photo of the splatters from dinner last night! Slow-cooked fennel, chorizo and and tomato: Pollock in the kitchen. (Another gripe about Amy Sedaris: anti-garlic, anti-chilli.) I'm teaching Highway 61 Revisited in a couple of weeks so I invited the most knowledgable Dylan fan I know over for dinner and a very earnest post-prandial listening session. This was great, but not quite as great as the discovery that this video was shot before my guest - aka Fergus Kalantzis Grabbledang - left Paris. Yes, it's a Dirty Spanish Man. (Yes, it's an in-joke.)

Reader advisory

I've been trying to sculpt a witty set of informed opinions on the work of David Sedaris over the last few weeks. Five years too late, I understand: the dry wave of Sedaris apparently hit its peak some time back yonder. I've stretched out my hands to the zeitgeist and if the handful I've managed to grab is from the section marked 'archaic,' too bad. I'm still not quite convinced as to the Greatness of el Sedaris - all that glibness, all that critical acclaim - but the essays are suiting me quite nicely as late-night reads at the moment. Brief, not at all unamusing, concerned with Paris and New York, not too taxing on my decrepit eyes/head/wrists. I can't help but hearing echoes between Sedaris and Jonathan Franzen, another boomer American whose work provokes my inner ambivalent, especially in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: the lost childhood of the 1970s, the somewhat kinder pathologies of family life, the ready play into a set of received ideas about American cultural life. I'm sick of light reading but Sedaris, he's alright.

Given said Sedaris is so interested in family life, I thought testing out Amy Sedaris wouldn't be such a bad idea. It was wrong; I was wrong. I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence is a dreadful book. I don't know why I didn't look at the cover more closely before I bought it. I was waiting for a friend in Parramatta Borders and a little disoriented. This book is another it's OK to be a good lil' ol' woman guide of the most tedious order, all female anxiety and New Domesticity.* Would-be wifey-wifey is instructed to fuss around with flowers and themed dips and sensitive guest lists. She's not necessarily searching for a hubby, she drinks a lot, she's kinda quirky. I'm a great fan of occasions which involve activities, libations, comestibles and selective invites (ah, who will forget the Greenknowe Games Nights of 2006) but this saccharine and Malibu dipped epistle made me glad my Great Entertainer alter-ego is having a long snooze. Too many hints n' tips, way too much mayonnaise in the recipes. I discard all my habitual sensitivities about sibling rivalry to disendorse the little sister over the big brother. Do not buy this book. If you are curious and foolish, you can have my copy. For keeps.

* Incidentally, now that raunch culture, princesses, pornstars etc. have been variously mined for the noble purposes of feminist critique, I think someone needs to smash the re-emerging paradigm of inane girlie domesticity. The author pic from the ASed website suggests why. Anywaze, at this moment, my apartment is quiveringly re-asserting its inner bordello.

The anti-irk

Upbeat is a dangerous mode.

And jocund is a dangerous word.

Featured in line 16 of Wordsworth's 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,' not my favourite poem by not my favourite poet, 'jocund' was discussed three times on in class on Wednesday. It was the only word which needed definition in the poem. Not only that, there were No Allusions to identify. The poem didn't have notes because the poem didn't darn need notes. Common touch, that Wordsworth. Drizzle, daffodils, ennui.

I'm suspicious of jocundity, jocosity, cheer and most aspects of glee. Fortunately, I recognise them all as ephemeral fancies, chimerical chemical effusions into the deeper bleak. Here's some of the things fueling today's novelty mood:

• Memories of crumbed veal marrow for dinner last night. (Chez Mon, avec JJ et al.)
• The knowledge that the narrator of Tim Winton's latest novel, Breath, is named Pikelet.
• Plums.
• No classes till next Wednesday.
• An email from msn and the Sydney Powerhouse about an email archiving project. Not only do I keep most pieces of paper, I rarely delete emails. Freudians have uncomplimentary things to say about these retentive habits. I will nonetheless be able to deliver a significant contribution to the historians of the future.
• Mild sun.
• Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella? Fo'Drizzle.
• Betty Davis.

Chirp chirp tweet.

Professional fulfillment

"As described in tutorial by Catriona, status kept people high up in society.'

Anyone seen Dead Poets Society?

Inertia v entropy

Here’s a list of the things I’m not going to do today:

1. Go to the Kings Cross Food and Wine festival to harass the monger of smoked fishes into becoming my friend.
2. Sit in the park and read the paper, bloody Richard bloody Ford, or any of the books sitting on my shelves.
3. Prepare for Tuesday’s Gatsby classes.
4. Drink red wine.
5. Join my sister’s Sopranos marathon on the couch.
6. Drink gin.
7. Wear a frock.
8. Further my novelistic aspirations.

Some dissolute lady of letters. It's more Ben Franklin than Rousseau round here, lamentably.

What, then, is on my faaabulous, glamorous agenda? Point by point, to do today:

1. Mark essays.
2. Listen to Theme Time Radio Hour.
3. Poach quinces (possibly).
4. Complain via the medium of this blog.

A brief weisswurst interlude last night at Una’s aside, this has been a startlingly inert weekend. Usually, a few interesting typos and deadpan syntactical errors will perk my spirits up so that I can keep on driving the old red pen across the page. Puns there have been, no doubt about that. One student wrote a paper on Sophoclese, the language, I suppose, of classical tragedy. Numerous references to the sanctity of 'marriage vowels' in another paper conjured up images of nuptial ceremonies in which couples exchange long, drawnout moans: aaaah, ooooh, eeee. Not being a scholar of the Classics, it's a little hard to respond in a useful manner to phrasing like this:

The truth is uncovered – the prophecy has been fulfilled and Oedipus the noble hero realises that he has monstrously offended the rules of Greek life to honour thy parents through parricide and incest, and tragically falls from grace.

Punctuate that, miss. Those Greeks, they knew how to live. Convolutions of syntax and punctuation are cheap laughs, and probably hypocritical laughs, but I'm not going to turn them down. All this, coupled with statements like ‘Truth was a really major idea for the Ancient Greeks’ take me a long way. Still this weekend, I’ve had to contend with a more heinous volume of papers than usual and it could've destroyed my precarious appetite for consciousness, employment, life. I've been saved, however, by Bob Dylan and downloads of Theme Time Radio Hour. So splendid are these broadcasts, I wouldn't choose to leave the proximity of some speakers. Unless I've died of mortification or convulsions induced by apostrophe deficiency or tannin overload, I'll extol the delights of Dylan on the wireless later in the day. Oh yes, and the quinces.

Topical

I'm still marking essays. It's awful and incessant and exhausting; my eyes are crossed and my ankles are swelling. Slightly woozy as I am, I'm not sure whether to be delighted or appalled by the following consideration of Oedipus Rex, quoted verbatim.

Relationships between family is a main theme in Sophicheles plays, and he could be saying that relationships are a key factor in any ideal life. However as we know the relationship with this family was not as normal as others in our modern society. This is partly because of the fact that the gods have cursed Oedipus and said that he will murder his father and marry his mother. This is not an ideal way of living, and it is possible that Sophocles being the master he is trying to express the importance of family in having an ideal life. This could be the message he is trying to express by making Oedipus marry his mother and kill his father.

I've been pulling up students who quote at length without exegesis but reserve the right to do so myself. I have a feeling it might be Mother's Day tomorrow and anyway, current affairs make incest jokes even more risky than usual.

Esta noche (blah)

Passing the 7-11 ATM on Daaaahlinghurst Rd. This evening. Light Drizzle.
Green jacket (hand held shakily to jaw): What can't I remember my PIN?
Shorter (shriller): Because you're stupid.
Green jacket: Shiiiit.

Billboard at KX station. Stuffy.
You'd be home by now if you lived in Adelaide.

Recollections of mid-afternoons lost. Breezy.
A. has cholesterol problems. He can't eat butter until the pains in his heart stop. Possibly this will take years. We collide outside a pastry shop. The pain of a diet sans salt, butter or red wine exceeds my imaginative capacities. Yet more David Sedaris conversation. We part company and I enter the pastry shop. Return home with cheesecake and chocolate biscuits in case of adverse future diagnoses.

On the floor. Visible.
200,000+ words to mark.